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Wednesday, September 04, 2019

I had a baby! On June 27, Isaac was born. He's now about 9 weeks old and thriving. He had a little bit of a difficult start in life due to getting lots of fluid in his lungs at birth and spent his hospital stay in the NICU (I felt I should explain the presence of tubes you see in the picture below).

I feel like I have gotten over some of the most difficult parts of the transition- those early weeks are never easy. I am physically recovered from the birth now and starting to form a new routine. The baby is giving me some long stretches of sleep at night and that's helped a lot lately. My oldest two started school yesterday, Owen will start preschool three days a week soon. It's time to play catch up with documenting some of my recent quilt finishes.

Before Isaac was born, I finished this quilt for my nephew. Parker was born in February, his family (my brother and SIL) live 40 minutes away in Deerfield, NH. I have made quilts for the kids previously (shown here and here) but decided to abandon the sailing theme for something different this time. I pulled out this classic "2D Zoo" Alexander Henry print and bought the Cluck Cluck Sew pattern Boxed Up.

The top came together quite fast. It lingered for a while, waiting for quilting. As time passed, my body kept growing larger with the baby and the thought of standing at the longarm frame was painful. But eventually I quilted it - and it wasn't too bad- it's a pretty small quilt after all.

I had some wide, "cuddle" fabric in my stash- purchased from a yard sale ages ago. I decided to give it a try and it quilted up quite easily. It's not super thick fabric and quite soft. I bound the quilt in a Kona solid.

I love sewing for my niece and nephews. So far, my parents have eight grandchildren and only two of them are girls. I have just one nephew on my husband's side of the family. I am always on the lookout for great boy fabrics and patterns.

Friday, June 07, 2019

Normally I am not one to whine about pregnancy but this one has been a doozy. I am exactly 3 weeks from my scheduled c-section and I am finally feeling like taking care of an infant is preferable to the current state of misery I am in. I have issues in the third trimester and this week they were combined with a nasty chest cold. I've been lying on the couch all week, trying to entertain my four year old and trying to avoid justifying gratuitous fabric purchases from my phone. I'd rather be sewing, but it would be easier to buy fabric off the internet when I am feeling so miserable. So far I have withstood the temptation..... And writing this blog post will hopefully help me remember that I have sewed and I will be able to sew again someday......

I recently completed a few quilts that I am just not in love with... They are big and I just don't know what to do with them. They are the union jack quilt and scrappy rainbow quilts:

The Union Jack quilt just doesn't thrill me at all: I fear I made it too big and I have no special affinity to England! Why did I make it? I think I was attracted to the pattern because it was an easy foundation paper pieced pattern and it would showcase large scale prints very well.... The scrappy rainbow quilt is fun but I am just not a ROYGBIV type of gal.....

I am not sure what to do with these quilts, I may actually try to sell them. They frustrate me when I see them in a stack in my bedroom taking up space. This disappointment has made me think about the quilts I've made that I REALLY love and why I really love them.

So the focus of this post is to share my five favorites - my love for them has to be strong enough that they'd be the first items to save if we were forced to evacuate our home.

I pulled the pictures off of my blog as I thought about this topic, there's no strong particular order in what I am sharing:

First, is my Swoon quilt. When I started this quilt, I made the block in the middle and thought it might just become a mini quilt for my sewing room. But I had a lot of fun making the block and piecing it wasn't too bad after doing some simple quilt math that eliminated a lot of seams and avoided breaking up the large scale prints. Before I knew it, I was ripping apart my stash looking for other fabric combinations to make into more blocks. I cut everything in preparation for a quilt retreat and I sewed it all together in a weekend when I was pregnant with Owen. It just came together so fast, which was satisfying and somewhat rare for me. It's scrappy but still has a unifed color scheme. It's very different than most swoon quilts out there- I put a personal twist on a wildly popular pattern.

This quilt is practically identical to the tutorial I used. Usually I like to make my own version of other's patterns, but for this one, I wanted to own a quilt just like Blue Elephant Stitches made for the 2012 Value Quilt Along. The only thing I ended up doing differently was the piano key border- a happy accident in truth. I love this quilt because it has my favorite colors: blues, pinks, and yellows. It's scrappy and the play with value is just perfect.

I think it is pretty surprising that this quilt made the top five on my list of favorite quilts. I actually thought I would hate this quilt as I was making it. It was quite outside my comfort zone- random scraps all squished together as a leaders/enders project. It was tedious to cut all the squares and rectangles from scraps.... but I just LOVE the end result. I love to look at this quilt and remember all of the projects these fabrics started with: dresses for my daughter, craft fair items, other quilts, some are scraps that other people gave me, etc. I would LOVE to create another scrappy quilt that makes me this happy and I've been on the hunt for another pattern that harnesses the craziness of 100% scraps without being too visually overwhelming.

This quilt has a lot of sentimental value. It features a few African wax prints purchased in Uganda, where my husband and I volunteered for four months before settling in Massachusetts at the beginning of our marriage. My husband consistently says that it is his favorite quilt I've made after all these years of making. It is my own version of "Dotty for Dresden," a pattern found in the iconic quilting book, Material Obsession. I feel sentimental about it because it was one of the first projects I tackled after discovering "modern" quilting and feeling so excited about using bright colors and was starting to discover my own "voice" when it came to quilting....

Finally, I am so very proud of this Hello Kitty quilt and making it with my daughter are some of my favorite memories with her even though she's only seven years old right now. We worked on it together not long after the birth of Owen and it was a way to feel connected with her despite the demands of caring for her younger sibling. She never got tired of picking out the squares for every "grid" block we needed to make. We went to a somewhat odd longarm rental situation in Colorado Springs to quilt a daisy pattern all over it and she was SO excited! We enjoyed Wendy's frosties as the Statler Stitcher quilted away.... The funny thing about this design, is that when you put it on a bed- it doesn't look like much.... You have to get a more "distant" view to really appreciate it. She still loves it now and we found the perfect purple cat face sheets at Target to go with it.

As I think about these quilts and why they're my favorites, a few themes come to mind:

They are made with scraps or at least have a scrappy look

The overall design is what is satisfying to me, not necessarily the great fabrics I used

I've made a lot of quilts and I never start one thinking, "this is going to be my absolute favorite thing I've ever made." It's helpful to always be making and exercise one's creativity: not everything is going to be a perfect hit every time but your chances of making something you're thrilled with increases as you just keep on sewing. Quantity often leads to quality because of the many hours of practice you accumulate.

Good quilting does nothing but enhance the project, some of my finished quilts frustrate me because I lost momentum with the quilting step and settled for getting the three layers together rather than investing in the time and/or money to do something besides a lazy stipple or loop.

Making quilts for my immediate family members is extremely satisfying- I don't have the anguish of "giving them away" because they stay in my house and I love sharing my talents with my husband and children. When they appreciate the quilts and I see the quilts in use, it adds a special feeling to our home.

I would love to see other bloggers tackle this idea- what are some of your all-time favorite makes? Let me know if you decide to address this question on your blog or IG.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Last year, Elisabeth Woo hosted a QAL on IG for the book she coauthored with Nichole Ramirez, the Fussy Cut Sampler. I decided to join in, I actually find QAL's to be quite motivating and fun to participate in as long as I really love the pattern it features. I already had a copy of the book and I decided to cut into my stash of Japanese fairy tale fabrics.

Here's a picture of the whole quilt:

I absolutely love this finish. It is scrappy, features fabrics I love, the piecing is interesting (not too simple), and the quilting brings it up a whole new level. I actually paid a professional longarm quilter friend to custom quilt this for me: Hannah Robinson. Her work is just perfect, the thread she chose works on every fabric, the free motion artistry is stunning, and she did a unique design on every single block (48 different blocks!).

I felt so weird paying someone else to quilt this for me. But I chose to do this for several reasons: my longarm table was still not functional (thanks to idiotic movers and an idiotic longarm table company that didn't care to help me get replacement parts), I am pregnant and find it difficult to stand for hours on end, my little one has stopped napping and my sewing time is increasingly limited, and I did not feel that my FMQ skills were up to the task of quilting this very special top that was not easy to make (more on that shortly!)! It's been about a decade since I paid someone to quilt for me. I literally only did it once before because I thought that was the only way to quilt a quilt: pay someone with a longarm to do it for you! But I am so happy I passed this over to Hannah and it was worth every penny!!!

People have asked me where I got all of these Japanese fairy tale fabrics. I wish I could say that I bought a bundle and it was as easy as that.... but that is definitely not the case. This was a collection I have been building for years- easily 10 years. It started on Flickr when it was so popular to swap fabric there. I've found some goodies on Etsy, at Pink Castle Fabrics, and SuperBuzzy. I even bought some at an epic yard sale. I still have a good amount of fabrics leftover but I have to admit I am a little tired of them but not enough to destash them.

I backed this quilt in an irresistible Stacy Hsu print from her 'Lil Red release. It was on clearance at a LQS when I lived in Colorado Springs. A quick warning: I bought the exact amount the book specified and ended up with over two yards extra......

As much as I love the first picture in this post that shows the full quilt, you really need to peek at individual blocks to appreciate this quilt. Every block tells a story and is cut and arranged very thoughtfully. I'll admit I found many of these blocks to be very time consuming but not too difficult to piece. But seriously, some of these blocks took me as much as two hours and that definitely felt tedious sometimes.....

This "3 little pigs" block shows some of the difficulty of the piecing well: getting those pig motifs in the little flying geese triangles was a monumental task:

This block features some scraps from a dress I made Charlotte several years ago, see the post here.

This block is one of my favorites, it's the "label" block and I fussy cut those tiny letters to spell out "Once Upon a Time."

All of my kids like this quilt but Charlotte is especially keen to "inherit" it (we had a discussion this weekend on what that word means). I tried not to make it too girly so that the boys might enjoy it too.

I am pretty proud to have share this finish. It definitely wasn't a quick or easy project but it's so satisfying to have finished a challenging pattern that uses some of my most special fabrics.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

I am pregnant with my fourth child and it's a boy. I am due July 4th. Honestly, it has been my most most difficult pregnancy both emotionally and physically. We've known for a while that we wanted to expand our family and relocating to the northeast was part of the plan. Even though pregnancy and caring for an infant is so difficult, I know it will all be worth it. The kids are excited and Charlotte even took the news of another boy quite well (I prepped her with how "special" it will be to be the only girl in the family....

My first priority to make items for the baby is to have their own special baby quilt made by mom. Hopefully they will be attached to it like Owen is to his (the binding is kind of falling apart thanks to his attachment to it and lots of unavoidable laundering). Charlotte's quilt has also seen a lot of love. Gregory preferred a store bought blanket from Kohl's that a friend gifted us (first picture of him with it in this post).

Baby boy #3 is hopefully going to love this wonky star quilt. I just love it and I am thrilled with it. By only feeling of regret is that the light mint green is going to look dirty fast.... but I couldn't resist the color scheme and don't really love baby/nursery themes that feature lots of dark colors. He's due in the summer after all.

A design wall was crucial in putting this quilt all together- every square had a specific home to make the arrangement turn out as planned.

I backed the quilt in an older Cotton and Steel lawn fabric. The colors match the quilt perfectly- you would have thought I planned the back before the front!

I used this project as a "leaders/enders" project but sometimes I just worked on it, just sewing, sewing, sewing (lots of time consuming cutting from the scrap bins too!). I knew I didn't want it to be a WIP I moved with, the long columns would be tricky to store neatly and I would've worried about the seams coming apart. The columns are uniform widths: 6.5", 4.5", 3.5", and 2.5" but I cut them in lengths with however long the scrap was- I hope that makes sense.

Did I make a dent in my scraps? The definitive answer is no. But I did use up all my obnoxious rainbow fabrics I bought in the early part of my sewing obsession that I no longer care for, they're all on the back- I'll post a picture sometime.

Sometime I would like to make this quilt again in a totally different, maybe more "grown up" color scheme. Wouldn't it be fun to make something like this in a pretty combination of navy, gray, and chartreuse? Or what about black, light pink, and gray? I don't know- the possibilities are endless.

Since moving, I haven't done very much sewing at all. It took forever to be able to set up my sewing room- we ended up buying some cabinets from Home Depot to hold all of my supplies and I love them but they took forever to arrive. The last "unpacking" task was to assemble the longarm and pretty quickly, we learned that seven parts of the table had been lost. We searched everywhere and found EVERYTHING else we thought we were missing (except for two handmade items I am confident the packers stole!) but we did not find the parts. The longarm table is exactly 10 years old, I worried that the parts would not be able to be replaced. I had reason to worry- the whole process was a nightmare and honestly made me feel pretty depressed. I couldn't bare to sew during this stressful time. I barely hit owning the longarm for one year and it was looking like the entire system could be rendered obsolete. But finally, a week ago- the right parts arrived and we just need to set it all up.

Amidst the longarm drama, over three weeks ago, I was hit with a nasty cold that I am still dealing with. I haven't worn real pants for longer than my outings to Urgent Care and I've missed every Christmas party I had planned to attend (four so far.... we'll see what happens this weekend). I am aching to get back to my favorite "coping skill" but I need to get better first. I am so sick of Netflix, I've lost 15 lbs, and I can't sleep in my own bed (a reclining couch offers some relief to my incessant coughing). Two of my three kids have caught the bug as well as one just recovered from pink eye, so yeah, it's been a rough month! I can't wait to get back to creating and really hope to be better for Christmas.

All this is shared not only to vent but to explain why it's been so quiet around here. I hope to get back to creating really soon!

Thursday, October 04, 2018

This post is long overdue, but my excuse is that this summer became defined by a cross country move: we've relocated from Colorado Springs, CO to Merrimack, NH! Moving across country is no easy task and it was a bit stressful and exhausting at times. But we made it. We're in a nice town, convenient for commuting, good schools, and a small community atmosphere. We live 45 minutes from my parents and 30 minutes from Billerica, where we'd previously spent 7 years living before we moved to Colorado.

We feel pretty fortunate to be able to return to our favorite part of the country. Leaving New England wasn't easy to begin with - but we were hopeful and determined to make Colorado our home. It was 4.5 years of lots of highs and lows. We bought a five bedroom house with a yard and a garage and our mortgage was the identical amount to the two bedroom townhouse we'd been renting in Billerica. I enjoyed the sunny weather, mild winters, being close(ish) to my sister, the community I found in a MOPs group and within the FRMQG. My mom visited often. But there were many struggles. Oddly enough, in a town known for being deeply "military"- we we were in a community surrounded by native Coloradoan's and we felt like outsiders. We opened our home to other families constantly and it was almost never reciprocated. "School choice" afforded my children better educational opportunities but it also resulted in too much time in the car and further isolation from other families.

Colorado Springs just made me feel so "anonymous." It's a word that may not perfectly explain the feeling of isolation and lack of community I had while living there. I've never been one to be too fearful about living away from where I've grown up- I went off to Utah for college, traveled the world during my education, and went to South Carolina on a whim for graduate school where I didn't know a soul. But life is a lot different when you're raising a family and feel like you have very minimal support outside of your immediate family.

I am not so naive that I think coming back to New England will solve all of our problems. There are challenges here too. I am living in a part of New Hampshire that is new to me and I am trying to figure things out. Despite the air of familiarity here, I still feel like I am starting over and it's downright exhausting to be the new girl again. I've done a little bit of sewing since flying out here on July 31st, but overall it's not been happening at all. I have a new sewing room that still needs setting up. I've been waiting for a few weeks now, to receive an order of stand alone cabinets that will substitute as a closet to hold my (ample) sewing supplies.

Leading up to this move, I used my longarm constantly to finish my quilts. I wasn't sure if we'd be able to find and buy a home in NH or MA that could accommodate a longarm frame and machine without making a child sleep on the couch. Thankfully, the home we bought has space for it! But I am still glad I pushed myself to quilt a lot- it gave me a lot of practice and I finished a lot of quilts. This is one of my proudest finishes:

The fiery Tula Pink Butterfly quilt:

This quilt spent a full month on the longarm, I really struggled with quilting it well and not being too frustrated with my sub-par free motion quilting skills. But I know I need to give myself some credit, I've come a long way from my "stippling" habit that dominated my FMQ style years ago.

I can easily say that this quilt is one of the most challenging quilts I've ever completed. It was tedious to do blocks twice- especially those dang ones with curves! I messed up the "mirror image" concept of several of the blocks many times. When the quilt top was all put together, I ended up taking out 3 different large blocks to switch out a bad fabric choice and re-orient one that was upside down. Do you know how challenging that is- to have something be technically "done"- but take a seam ripper to it and take out chunks of it, re-sew them, and put it all back together?! I can't believe I did that three times! And quilting it was just a bear. There were times when I'd go to the longarm in the basement and I'd just come right back upstairs and do something else because I was too discouraged to even try. I really think that I if I could've afforded to, I would've loved to been able to pay someone else to quilt it for me. Haha! But I really love it now that it's done.

Thanks for reading this lengthy post! I do love this space and the chance to write and record my creative and sometimes personal journey. All summer, I received emails from Bloglovin that I had new followers even when I wasn't posting much at all. I hope to share more soon and provide more insight than the snapshots on Instagram provides.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

I bought a big chunk of orange solid fabric at my LQS, an intended project for my three year old son, Owen. This kid LOVES the color orange- it's seriously uncanny to see his love and devotion to the color- it's definitely not something I taught or encouraged in him. In my search for a pattern to use with the orange fabric (and some FQ's from an older Cloud9 fabric line by Ed Emberley) I borrowed a friends book and I bought two patterns - but I still couldn't commit. Finally, I came across the element of an easy block: the Greek Cross. I figured out some quilt math to make the cross out of three pieces instead of five (minimizing the breaking up of the larger scaled animal fabrics seemed wise). Here's the very bright result:

This quilt came together in less than 3 weeks- once I finally had the plan- cutting and sewing took very little time. I love having my own longarm and the fact that I can just get something finished in my own home rather than seeking out the (less than stellar) options for renting a longarm in Colorado.

I quilted an all over, boxy meander over the whole quilt with orange thread.

This quilt measures 84x96.

I used some Rhoda Ruth wideback fabric for the backing and bound it in a blue stripe.

I was hoping the completion of this quilt would help my son be ready to transition to the twin sized bottom bunk of our bunk bed set but he's still attached to his toddler bed. Oh well! It will happen eventually.